Chapter 36

The daylight came. I rose at dawn. I busied myself for an hour or two with arranging my
things in my chamber, drawers, and wardrobe, in the order wherein I should wish to
leave them during a brief absence. Meantime, I heard St. John quit his room. He stopped
at my door: I feared he would knock—no, but a slip of paper was passed under the door.
I took it up. It bore these words—
“You left me too suddenly last night. Had you stayed but a little longer, you would have
laid your hand on the Christian’s cross and the angel’s crown. I shall expect your clear
decision when I return this day fortnight. Meantime, watch and pray that you enter not
into temptation: the spirit, I trust, is willing, but the flesh, I see, is weak. I shall pray for
you hourly.—Yours, ST. JOHN.”
“My spirit,” I answered mentally, “is willing to do what is right; and my flesh, I hope, is
strong enough to accomplish the will of Heaven, when once that will is distinctly known
to me. At any rate, it shall be strong enough to search—inquire—to grope an outlet from
this cloud of doubt, and find the open day of certainty.”
It was the first of June; yet the morning was overcast and chilly: rain beat fast on my
casement. I heard the front-door open, and St. John pass out. Looking through the
window, I saw him traverse the garden. He took the way over the misty moors in the
direction of Whitcross—there he would meet the coach.
“In a few more hours I shall succeed you in that track, cousin,” thought I: “I too have a
coach to meet at Whitcross. I too have some to see and ask after in England, before I
depart for ever.”
It wanted yet two hours of breakfast-time. I filled the interval in walking softly about my
room, and pondering the visitation which had given my plans their present bent. I
recalled that inward sensation I had experienced: for I could recall it, with all its
unspeakable strangeness. I recalled the voice I had heard; again I questioned whence it
came, as vainly as before: it seemed in me—not in the external world. I asked was it a
mere nervous impression—a delusion? I could not conceive or believe: it was more like
an inspiration. The wondrous shock of feeling had come like the earthquake which
shook the foundations of Paul and Silas’s prison; it had opened the doors of the soul’s
cell and loosed its bands—it had wakened it out of its sleep, whence it sprang trembling,
listening, aghast; then vibrated thrice a cry on my startled ear, and in my quaking heart
and through my spirit, which neither feared nor shook, but exulted as if in joy over the
success of one effort it had been privileged to make, independent of the cumbrous body.
“Ere many days,” I said, as I terminated my musings, “I will know something of him
whose voice seemed last night to summon me. Letters have proved of no avail—
personal inquiry shall replace them.”
At breakfast I announced to Diana and Mary that I was going a journey, and should be
absent at least four days.
“Alone, Jane?” they asked.

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“Yes; it was to see or hear news of a friend about whom I had for some time been
uneasy.”
They might have said, as I have no doubt they thought, that they had believed me to be
without any friends save them: for, indeed, I had often said so; but, with their true
natural delicacy, they abstained from comment, except that Diana asked me if I was sure
I was well enough to travel. I looked very pale, she observed. I replied, that nothing ailed
me save anxiety of mind, which I hoped soon to alleviate.
It was easy to make my further arrangements; for I was troubled with no inquiries—no
surmises. Having once explained to them that I could not now be explicit about my
plans, they kindly and wisely acquiesced in the silence with which I pursued them,
according to me the privilege of free action I should under similar circumstances have
accorded them.
I left Moor House at three o’clock P.M., and soon after four I stood at the foot of the sign-
post of Whitcross, waiting the arrival of the coach which was to take me to distant
Thornfield. Amidst the silence of those solitary roads and desert hills, I heard it
approach from a great distance. It was the same vehicle whence, a year ago, I had
alighted one summer evening on this very spot—how desolate, and hopeless, and
objectless! It stopped as I beckoned. I entered—not now obliged to part with my whole
fortune as the price of its accommodation. Once more on the road to Thornfield, I felt
like the messenger-pigeon flying home.
It was a journey of six-and-thirty hours. I had set out from Whitcross on a Tuesday
afternoon, and early on the succeeding Thursday morning the coach stopped to water
the horses at a wayside inn, situated in the midst of scenery whose green hedges and
large fields and low pastoral hills (how mild of feature and verdant of hue compared
with the stern North-Midland moors of Morton!) met my eye like the lineaments of a
once familiar face. Yes, I knew the character of this landscape: I was sure we were near
my bourne.
“How far is Thornfield Hall from here?” I asked of the ostler.
“Just two miles, ma’am, across the fields.”
“My journey is closed,” I thought to myself. I got out of the coach, gave a box I had into
the ostler’s charge, to be kept till I called for it; paid my fare; satisfied the coachman, and
was going: the brightening day gleamed on the sign of the inn, and I read in gilt letters,
“The Rochester Arms.” My heart leapt up: I was already on my master’s very lands. It fell
again: the thought struck it:—
“Your master himself may be beyond the British Channel, for aught you know: and then,
if he is at Thornfield Hall, towards which you hasten, who besides him is there? His
lunatic wife: and you have nothing to do with him: you dare not speak to him or seek his
presence. You have lost your labour—you had better go no farther,” urged the monitor.
“Ask information of the people at the inn; they can give you all you seek: they can solve
your doubts at once. Go up to that man, and inquire if Mr. Rochester be at home.”
The suggestion was sensible, and yet I could not force myself to act on it. I so dreaded a
reply that would crush me with despair. To prolong doubt was to prolong hope. I might
yet once more see the Hall under the ray of her star. There was the stile before me—the
very fields through which I had hurried, blind, deaf, distracted with a revengeful fury
tracking and scourging me, on the morning I fled from Thornfield: ere I well knew what

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course I had resolved to take, I was in the midst of them. How fast I walked! How I ran
sometimes! How I looked forward to catch the first view of the well-known woods! With
what feelings I welcomed single trees I knew, and familiar glimpses of meadow and hill
between them!
At last the woods rose; the rookery clustered dark; a loud cawing broke the morning
stillness. Strange delight inspired me: on I hastened. Another field crossed—a lane
threaded—and there were the courtyard walls—the back offices: the house itself, the
rookery still hid. “My first view of it shall be in front,” I determined, “where its bold
battlements will strike the eye nobly at once, and where I can single out my master’s
very window: perhaps he will be standing at it—he rises early: perhaps he is now
walking in the orchard, or on the pavement in front. Could I but see him!—but a
moment! Surely, in that case, I should not be so mad as to run to him? I cannot tell—I
am not certain. And if I did—what then? God bless him! What then? Who would be hurt
by my once more tasting the life his glance can give me? I rave: perhaps at this moment
he is watching the sun rise over the Pyrenees, or on the tideless sea of the south.”
I had coasted along the lower wall of the orchard—turned its angle: there was a gate
just there, opening into the meadow, between two stone pillars crowned by stone balls.
From behind one pillar I could peep round quietly at the full front of the mansion. I
advanced my head with precaution, desirous to ascertain if any bedroom window-
blinds were yet drawn up: battlements, windows, long front—all from this sheltered
station were at my command.
The crows sailing overhead perhaps watched me while I took this survey. I wonder
what they thought. They must have considered I was very careful and timid at first, and
that gradually I grew very bold and reckless. A peep, and then a long stare; and then a
departure from my niche and a straying out into the meadow; and a sudden stop full in
front of the great mansion, and a protracted, hardy gaze towards it. “What affectation of
diffidence was this at first?” they might have demanded; “what stupid regardlessness
now?”
Hear an illustration, reader.
A lover finds his mistress asleep on a mossy bank; he wishes to catch a glimpse of her
fair face without waking her. He steals softly over the grass, careful to make no sound;
he pauses—fancying she has stirred: he withdraws: not for worlds would he be seen. All
is still: he again advances: he bends above her; a light veil rests on her features: he lifts
it, bends lower; now his eyes anticipate the vision of beauty—warm, and blooming, and
lovely, in rest. How hurried was their first glance! But how they fix! How he starts! How
he suddenly and vehemently clasps in both arms the form he dared not, a moment since,
touch with his finger! How he calls aloud a name, and drops his burden, and gazes on it
wildly! He thus grasps and cries, and gazes, because he no longer fears to waken by any
sound he can utter—by any movement he can make. He thought his love slept sweetly:
he finds she is stone dead.
I looked with timorous joy towards a stately house: I saw a blackened ruin.
No need to cower behind a gate-post, indeed!—to peep up at chamber lattices, fearing
life was astir behind them! No need to listen for doors opening—to fancy steps on the
pavement or the gravel-walk! The lawn, the grounds were trodden and waste: the portal
yawned void. The front was, as I had once seen it in a dream, but a shell-like wall, very

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high and very fragile-looking, perforated with paneless windows: no roof, no
battlements, no chimneys—all had crashed in.
And there was the silence of death about it: the solitude of a lonesome wild. No wonder
that letters addressed to people here had never received an answer: as well despatch
epistles to a vault in a church aisle. The grim blackness of the stones told by what fate
the Hall had fallen—by conflagration: but how kindled? What story belonged to this
disaster? What loss, besides mortar and marble and wood-work had followed upon it?
Had life been wrecked as well as property? If so, whose? Dreadful question: there was
no one here to answer it—not even dumb sign, mute token.
In wandering round the shattered walls and through the devastated interior, I gathered
evidence that the calamity was not of late occurrence. Winter snows, I thought, had
drifted through that void arch, winter rains beaten in at those hollow casements; for,
amidst the drenched piles of rubbish, spring had cherished vegetation: grass and weed
grew here and there between the stones and fallen rafters. And oh! where meantime
was the hapless owner of this wreck? In what land? Under what auspices? My eye
involuntarily wandered to the grey church tower near the gates, and I asked, “Is he with
Damer de Rochester, sharing the shelter of his narrow marble house?”
Some answer must be had to these questions. I could find it nowhere but at the inn, and
thither, ere long, I returned. The host himself brought my breakfast into the parlour. I
requested him to shut the door and sit down: I had some questions to ask him. But when
he complied, I scarcely knew how to begin; such horror had I of the possible answers.
And yet the spectacle of desolation I had just left prepared me in a measure for a tale of
misery. The host was a respectable-looking, middle-aged man.
“You know Thornfield Hall, of course?” I managed to say at last.
“Yes, ma’am; I lived there once.”
“Did you?” Not in my time, I thought: you are a stranger to me.
“I was the late Mr. Rochester’s butler,” he added.
The late! I seem to have received, with full force, the blow I had been trying to evade.
“The late!” I gasped. “Is he dead?”
“I mean the present gentleman, Mr. Edward’s father,” he explained. I breathed again: my
blood resumed its flow. Fully assured by these words that Mr. Edward—my Mr.
Rochester (God bless him, wherever he was!)—was at least alive: was, in short, “the
present gentleman.” Gladdening words! It seemed I could hear all that was to come—
whatever the disclosures might be—with comparative tranquillity. Since he was not in
the grave, I could bear, I thought, to learn that he was at the Antipodes.
“Is Mr. Rochester living at Thornfield Hall now?” I asked, knowing, of course, what the
answer would be, but yet desirous of deferring the direct question as to where he really
was.
“No, ma’am—oh, no! No one is living there. I suppose you are a stranger in these parts,
or you would have heard what happened last autumn,—Thornfield Hall is quite a ruin:
it was burnt down just about harvest-time. A dreadful calamity! such an immense
quantity of valuable property destroyed: hardly any of the furniture could be saved. The
fire broke out at dead of night, and before the engines arrived from Millcote, the
building was one mass of flame. It was a terrible spectacle: I witnessed it myself.”

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“At dead of night!” I muttered. Yes, that was ever the hour of fatality at Thornfield. “Was
it known how it originated?” I demanded.
“They guessed, ma’am: they guessed. Indeed, I should say it was ascertained beyond a
doubt. You are not perhaps aware,” he continued, edging his chair a little nearer the
table, and speaking low, “that there was a lady—a—a lunatic, kept in the house?”
“I have heard something of it.”
“She was kept in very close confinement, ma’am; people even for some years was not
absolutely certain of her existence. No one saw her: they only knew by rumour that such
a person was at the Hall; and who or what she was it was difficult to conjecture. They
said Mr. Edward had brought her from abroad, and some believed she had been his
mistress. But a queer thing happened a year since—a very queer thing.”
I feared now to hear my own story. I endeavoured to recall him to the main fact.
“And this lady?”
“This lady, ma’am,” he answered, “turned out to be Mr. Rochester’s wife! The discovery
was brought about in the strangest way. There was a young lady, a governess at the Hall,
that Mr. Rochester fell in—”
“But the fire,” I suggested.
“I’m coming to that, ma’am—that Mr. Edward fell in love with. The servants say they
never saw anybody so much in love as he was: he was after her continually. They used
to watch him—servants will, you know, ma’am—and he set store on her past
everything: for all, nobody but him thought her so very handsome. She was a little small
thing, they say, almost like a child. I never saw her myself; but I’ve heard Leah, the
house-maid, tell of her. Leah liked her well enough. Mr. Rochester was about forty, and
this governess not twenty; and you see, when gentlemen of his age fall in love with girls,
they are often like as if they were bewitched. Well, he would marry her.”
“You shall tell me this part of the story another time,” I said; “but now I have a particular
reason for wishing to hear all about the fire. Was it suspected that this lunatic, Mrs.
Rochester, had any hand in it?”
“You’ve hit it, ma’am: it’s quite certain that it was her, and nobody but her, that set it
going. She had a woman to take care of her called Mrs. Poole—an able woman in her
line, and very trustworthy, but for one fault—a fault common to a deal of them nurses
and matrons—she kept a private bottle of gin by her, and now and then took a drop over-
much. It is excusable, for she had a hard life of it: but still it was dangerous; for when
Mrs. Poole was fast asleep after the gin and water, the mad lady, who was as cunning as
a witch, would take the keys out of her pocket, let herself out of her chamber, and go
roaming about the house, doing any wild mischief that came into her head. They say she
had nearly burnt her husband in his bed once: but I don’t know about that. However, on
this night, she set fire first to the hangings of the room next her own, and then she got
down to a lower storey, and made her way to the chamber that had been the
governess’s—(she was like as if she knew somehow how matters had gone on, and had
a spite at her)—and she kindled the bed there; but there was nobody sleeping in it,
fortunately. The governess had run away two months before; and for all Mr. Rochester
sought her as if she had been the most precious thing he had in the world, he never
could hear a word of her; and he grew savage—quite savage on his disappointment: he
never was a wild man, but he got dangerous after he lost her. He would be alone, too. He

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sent Mrs. Fairfax, the housekeeper, away to her friends at a distance; but he did it
handsomely, for he settled an annuity on her for life: and she deserved it—she was a
very good woman. Miss Adèle, a ward he had, was put to school. He broke off
acquaintance with all the gentry, and shut himself up like a hermit at the Hall.”
“What! did he not leave England?”
“Leave England? Bless you, no! He would not cross the door-stones of the house, except
at night, when he walked just like a ghost about the grounds and in the orchard as if he
had lost his senses—which it is my opinion he had; for a more spirited, bolder, keener
gentleman than he was before that midge of a governess crossed him, you never saw,
ma’am. He was not a man given to wine, or cards, or racing, as some are, and he was not
so very handsome; but he had a courage and a will of his own, if ever man had. I knew
him from a boy, you see: and for my part, I have often wished that Miss Eyre had been
sunk in the sea before she came to Thornfield Hall.”
“Then Mr. Rochester was at home when the fire broke out?”
“Yes, indeed was he; and he went up to the attics when all was burning above and
below, and got the servants out of their beds and helped them down himself, and went
back to get his mad wife out of her cell. And then they called out to him that she was on
the roof, where she was standing, waving her arms, above the battlements, and shouting
out till they could hear her a mile off: I saw her and heard her with my own eyes. She
was a big woman, and had long black hair: we could see it streaming against the flames
as she stood. I witnessed, and several more witnessed, Mr. Rochester ascend through
the sky-light on to the roof; we heard him call ‘Bertha!’ We saw him approach her; and
then, ma’am, she yelled and gave a spring, and the next minute she lay smashed on the
pavement.”
“Dead?”
“Dead! Ay, dead as the stones on which her brains and blood were scattered.”
“Good God!”
“You may well say so, ma’am: it was frightful!”
He shuddered.
“And afterwards?” I urged.
“Well, ma’am, afterwards the house was burnt to the ground: there are only some bits of
walls standing now.”
“Were any other lives lost?”
“No—perhaps it would have been better if there had.”
“What do you mean?”
“Poor Mr. Edward!” he ejaculated, “I little thought ever to have seen it! Some say it was a
just judgment on him for keeping his first marriage secret, and wanting to take another
wife while he had one living: but I pity him, for my part.”
“You said he was alive?” I exclaimed.
“Yes, yes: he is alive; but many think he had better be dead.”

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“Why? How?” My blood was again running cold. “Where is he?” I demanded. “Is he in
England?”
“Ay—ay—he’s in England; he can’t get out of England, I fancy—he’s a fixture now.”
What agony was this! And the man seemed resolved to protract it.
“He is stone-blind,” he said at last. “Yes, he is stone-blind, is Mr. Edward.”
I had dreaded worse. I had dreaded he was mad. I summoned strength to ask what had
caused this calamity.
“It was all his own courage, and a body may say, his kindness, in a way, ma’am: he
wouldn’t leave the house till every one else was out before him. As he came down the
great staircase at last, after Mrs. Rochester had flung herself from the battlements, there
was a great crash—all fell. He was taken out from under the ruins, alive, but sadly hurt:
a beam had fallen in such a way as to protect him partly; but one eye was knocked out,
and one hand so crushed that Mr. Carter, the surgeon, had to amputate it directly. The
other eye inflamed: he lost the sight of that also. He is now helpless, indeed—blind and a
cripple.”
“Where is he? Where does he now live?”
“At Ferndean, a manor-house on a farm he has, about thirty miles off: quite a desolate
spot.”
“Who is with him?”
“Old John and his wife: he would have none else. He is quite broken down, they say.”
“Have you any sort of conveyance?”
“We have a chaise, ma’am, a very handsome chaise.”
“Let it be got ready instantly; and if your post-boy can drive me to Ferndean before dark
this day, I’ll pay both you and him twice the hire you usually demand.”